Market Analysis Report

Bitcoin Scaling Agreement Officially Met: Segwit + 2MB Hard Fork

On May 23, the Digital Currency Group (DCG) revealed that miners and businesses came to a consensus to solve bitcoin’s underlying scaling issue. Agroup of companies representing the bitcoin industry and community with 83.3% of hashing power agreed to the activation of Segregated Witness (Segwit) and a 2MB hard fork within six months thereafter. The agreement reads:

“This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community. We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core,” 

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Aventus is Using Blockchain Technology to Tackle the Ticketing Industry's Problems

In a bid to mitigate some of the ticketing industry's most pressing issues like the unauthorized resale of bulk bought tickets, counterfeiting, and lack of visibility, Aventus is building a blockchain-based protocol that creates a more fair, secure, and transparent event ticketing industry, practically eliminating counterfeit tickets and unfair touting. This platform allows event organizers to create, manage and promote their events and tickers in a cost-efficient way. The blog post reads:

"At the core of the Aventus solution is a model where off-blockchain transactions of tickets are prevented. By ensuring that sales occur through the platform, event organisers can reliably enforce resale price minima and maxima, and even receive a portion of secondary sales revenue."

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Bitcoin and Ether Continue to Rally

Both Bitcoin and Ether continue to surge in value to new heights. Bitcoin is currently sitting at $2,339 after a 7.85% surge with $283M exchanged in the past 24hours in the USD market. Ethereum also continues to break records, sitting at its all-time high of $186.35 after surging 14.50% in the last 24hours. Volume is also large on Ethereum, with $120M exchanged in the last day.

See live charts here (BTC) and here (ETH)

Blockchain Consortium R3 Raises Record $107 Million

The global banking blockchain consortium led by R3 has raised a record $107 million in a fundraising round, the largest single investment in a blockchain company to date. Over 40 of its 100+ members participated in the second stage to raise $107 million. Investors include the Japan’s SBI group, the UK’s HSBC, Brazil’s Banco Bradesco, French investment bank Natixis and a number of others from around the world. The third and final stage will be open for investment later this year. R3 CEO David Rutter stated:

“This investment is unprecedented. Many of the world’s largest financial firms have come together not just with capital support, but with a robust commitment to work with R3 in developing industry solutions that will be the building blocks of the new financial services infrastructure.”

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